Browser kingdom sim Illyriad celebrates its fifth anniversary

Not a lot of browser-based MMOs make it to their half-decade mark, which is why it’s impressive to see the scrappy kingdom sim Illyriad celebrating its fifth anniversary this year.

The team took the opportunity to reminisce about how far the game’s come in that time and to share a wall of fun statistics, including the fact that 287,000 players have tried out the game so far. It’s also interesting that Illyriad has had only 15 total hours of downtime in all five years.

Illyriad has a lot in the works going forward, including graphical improvements, more interactivity, and better strategic maps for would-be conquerors.

Pixelmancer – Illyriad is a bit unusual in the F2P genre in that it’s a persistent, non-resetting, non-sharded, single instance gameworld… so we can’t possibly screw over our veteran players by allowing new players with a big credit card to ‘instabuy’ power. One of the largest factors in the game’s longevity is that we simply don’t allow pay-to-win; and I’d like to especially thank you for noticing!

FineFineValentine – Illyriad is certainly not everyone’s cup-of-tea, that’s for sure. It’s slow paced by design, and we specialise in ‘depth of gameplay’ which is hard to do on a strategic game without a few menus. There may be too many, for sure, but we’re not far away from releasing our new 3D worldmap in WebGL (you can play with an unfinished preview here: http://world.illyriad.co.uk/player-preview.html ) =, which should add to the UI experience, and perhaps remove a menu or two :)

Potajito – let us know how you get on! Ingame, GM Rikoo can often be found in Global Chat, and we really do value player feedback on what they like as well as, more importantly for us, what they don’t like.

Thanks again, everyone. Much appreciated from all of us here.

James N
CEO, Illyriad Games

You must be logged in to vote0You must be logged in to vote

3 years ago

Guest

Pixelmancer

This seems far more sane, approachable and friendly than the hundreds of other similar games out there. It also isn’t obnoxiously P2W like most of those similar games, so it earns at least a look from me…
Made an account (Fairfax @ -166, 262 should anyone want to team up) and going to give this a whirl for a week to see how it flows.

You must be logged in to vote0You must be logged in to vote

3 years ago

Guest

Ghostmourn

oww shiny!

You must be logged in to vote0You must be logged in to vote

3 years ago

Guest

mmonerd

ok interesting ! have to try this game.

You must be logged in to vote0You must be logged in to vote

3 years ago

Guest

Oleg Chebeneev

Never heard of it before

You must be logged in to vote0You must be logged in to vote

3 years ago

Guest

FineFineValentine

Had to Google this. Looks like a cross between a SNES RPG’s World Map screen… and it’s menus. Lots, and lots, and lots of menus. Man – this does not look fun at all to me. But it is an impressive achievement nonetheless. Especially the lack of downtime.

This one… is an oddity for sure. I can’t imagine it showing up in a “Choose My Adventure” any time soon, that’s for sure! Not even a “Sampler Platter”-edition like this whole month ;)